Current assessments of the ecological impacts of fires, often termed burn severity, investigate the degree to which an ecosystem has changed due to a fire and typically encompass both vegetation and soil effects. Burn severity assessments at local to regional scales are typically achieved using spectral indices (such as the differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) and the Relativized differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR) derived from satellite remote sensing data before and following fire. Although considerable efforts have been made to quantify post-fire burn severity across large spatial extents through spectral data, the explicit physiological link between fire behavior, tree mortality, and spectral reflectance is lacking, and inhibits prediction and quantification of tree mortality and recovery post-fire. As my dissertation research thus far has established this link in the laboratory with tree seedlings, the primary objective of the proposed research is to determine whether these relationships scale up to management levels by extending this research to mature trees in the field.